Hi all, I am hoping to build an icf home. I am designing the home myself as much as possible. Before I employ a structural engineer I would be very grateful if someone could advise here. So our ground floor, which will be semi sub grade built into a slope, will measure approximately 18m long and 6m wide. This will have an icf flat roof/floor as more than half of it is exposed as garden space. The top two floors will be sitting perpendicular on it, like a cross essentially. Does the ground floor require supporting walls or lintels for the above walls or can the 5m span support it? Then above we have a structure measuring 14m long by 7m wide, nearly two stories high with a mezzanine over half the 1st floor. Again, can the icf span 7m across with no structural vertical support below? And lastly, with an icf roof on the 7m wide structure, with an overhang of a metre or so, and a 35* pitch, can this be supported by a cast in ridge beam 14m long, with no vertical support needed underneath? Lastly, the mezzanine will cover 9m of the 14m, leaving a void over the living room. If support is indeed required for the roof, we could have a beam in the mezzanine floor 4m in and spanning the 7m width, and then a column to the roof, but hope this is not necessary. Any advice would be hugely appreciated. I hope I've made it clear. I've attached pictures to help. Cheers

Not sure where you are building, but in the US the icf roof will bump you out of being able to use the standard code book and an engineer sign-off will most likely be required.

It is hard to visualize what you are building. You could try a attaching a picture.

Welcome to the forum and hope you have a great build, sounds very neat.

Sorry, but i didnt know better it sounds like you are building a Falling Water replica or like new-boston, I am just picturing a bunch of cantilevers which will definetly require an engineer’s touch to design and approval all the beams and steel/fiber reinforcement. Try posting the pic again - under 200kb.

From the way he's talking, I'm thinking he means something like this.

And sorry, mangled the side-on view length a bit to shor roofline in the top down.

I think it is funny how sometimes we keep a thread going even thought the original poster is long gone....

What was that?

"Builkding Science Otaku"?